50 Greatest Moments in Materials

The American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (AIME) consists of 4 Member Societies. One of them, The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS) includes members who are materials scientists. TMS introduced the 50 Greatest Moments in Materials to recognize the impact of materials in history and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of TMS as a member society of the AIME. “A Great Materials Moment is defined as a pivotal or capstone event of human observation and/or intervention that led to a paradigm shift in humanity’s understanding of materials behavior, that introduced a new era of materials utilization, and/or that yielded significant materials-enabled socio-economic changes.” (JOM, February 2007, pg 14). Dozens of esteemed materials professionals were invited to give their views on great materials moments and the result was 650 suggestions that TMS distilled into a list of 100 official candidates. This list was opened to online voting and more than 900 individuals (materials students and professionals as well as the general public) completed the survey. The votes were converted into an ordered ranking by use of a weighting system: each first place vote that a moment received counted as ten points, each second place vote counted as nine points and so on with each tenth place vote counting as one point. Once the weights were assigned the points were totaled for each moment. The candidate with the greatest of points became the Greatest Materials Moment. Here are the moments from number 50 to number 1. You can find the distilled list of 100 official candidates listed in the Timeline on the Engineering and Technology History Wiki’s homepage Engineering and Technology History Wiki.

Further Reading

This entry is based on The Greatest Moments in Materials Science and Engineering, published in JOM, an official publication of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society.

A.A.Griffith publishes “The Phenomenon of Rupture and Flow in Solids,” which casts the problem of fracture in terms of energy balance.

1920

49.

Adolf Martens examines the microstructure of a hard steel alloy and finds that, unlike many inferior steels that show little coherent patterning, this steel had many varieties of patterns, especially banded regions of differently oriented microcrystals.

1890

48.

Richard Feynman presents “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” at a meeting of the American Physical Society.